Redemption Road(105)

A fever dream, she thought. That’s what Adrian had always been.

Only, now he was not. He watched the water beside them, the glimpses that were black and slick beyond the trees.

Elizabeth asked, “Can you tell me why we’re here?”

He didn’t say anything at first. Tires hummed, and sudden ripples stirred the water. She thought it was a snake, the way it moved, or the spined back of some enormous fish.

“This is an old swamp,” he said. “Half a million acres of cypress and black water, of alligators and pine and plants you won’t find anywhere else in the world. There’re small islands if you know how to find them, and families that go back three hundred years, hard people descended from escaped convicts and runaway slaves. Eli Lawrence was one of them. This was his home.”

“Eli Lawrence is someone you knew in prison?”

“Knew? Yes. But it was more than that.”

“What do you mean?”

Adrian watched the forest for a long minute. “Have you ever been in prison?”

“You know I haven’t.”

“Then, imagine you’re a soldier behind enemy lines. You’re alone and cut off, but you can see others out there in the mist and the dark, all the people that want to hurt or kill you. You’re so cold and scared you can’t sleep or eat—you can barely breathe. But maybe you hurt a few of them first, and maybe you get lucky enough to survive the first day, the first night. But everything piles up, the sleeplessness and the cold and the goddamn, awful fear. Because nothing you’ve ever known could prepare you for being so utterly alone. It drains you from the inside out, renders you down to something you don’t even recognize. But, you manage a few days, maybe even a week. There’s blood on your hands by then, and you’ve done things, maybe terrible things. But you cling to hope because you know there’s a line out there somewhere, and that everything you’ve ever loved is on the other side of it. All you have to do is get there, and then it’s over. You’re home and you’re alive, and you think that before long it’ll be as if the horror was a dream, and not your life.”

“I can see that.”

“Being a cop on the inside is the same thing, but there’s no line anywhere, and it’s not days but years.”

“And Eli Lawrence helped you?”

“Helped me. Saved me. Even after they killed him.”

Adrian’s voice broke, but Elizabeth thought she saw parts of it. “When you say they killed him?”

“Preston and the warden, Olivet and two others named Jacks and Woods.”

“Guards?”

“Yes.”

The road curved left. Elizabeth downshifted, then accelerated through the back of it.

“Eli was my friend. And they killed him for what he knew, not for being a thief or a killer, but for this thing that he alone could tell them. They came on a Sunday and took him. I didn’t see him for nine days after that, and when he did come back, it was only to die.” Adrian kept his eyes on the swamp, on stalking birds and black lilies. “They broke half the bones in his body, then brought him back thinking he’d tell me the secret he’d refused to tell them. I watched him drown in his own blood and held him as it happened. After that, I was next.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said; but he didn’t care for her pity.

“I wanted them to pay for what they did. I’ve had dreams of killing them.”

“But, you let Olivet live.”

“That was Eli, too. That mercy.”

“What about William Preston?”

Adrian looked at his swollen hands and nodded once. “I’m fine with that, too.”

He said nothing else for twenty minutes. He pointed left or right, and she made the turns as the road dwindled to broken pavement, then gravel and soft, black earth. Elizabeth wanted to know more, but was patient. Besides, broken as it was, the road into the swamp was his confessional, not hers.

“Do you know where we are?”

“Yes.”

She considered the unbroken forest. “There’re no signs or markers.”

“It took seven hours for Eli’s lungs to fill with the blood that drowned him. Every word was an agony for him. I couldn’t forget them if I tried. He wanted me to find this place.”

“Because…?”

“Slow down,” he said. “This is it.”

Elizabeth stopped in the center of the old road. They were thirty miles from the nearest town, deep in the woods that bled into the swamp. The place he meant was a gash in the trees beside a mound of tumbled stone and a fallen sign that was no more than a square of rusted iron. “Are you sure this is it?”

“It fits what he told me.”

Elizabeth didn’t like it. The track was overgrown, but not completely. At some point people used it. “What’s down there?”

“The reason for everything.”

Elizabeth didn’t like the answer, either. She looked up and down the empty road, then into the gloom beneath the trees, seeing shadows and vines and broadleaf plants the size of a child. The whole place felt bottomless and forgotten.

“You’re sure about this?” Adrian nodded so Elizabeth eased onto the track, scraping through the deepest ruts before the ground smoothed enough to go faster than a walk. “How far?”